The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes--The Counterfeit Detective

by Stuart Douglas

  Holmes’s speech raised far more questions than it answered, but before I could quiz him further, Peters returned and, from the top of the gangway, waved that we should follow him.

  Quickly we ran across and onto the ship itself, where Peters waited in the shadow of a doorway. “This way,” he said, “and mind how you go. It’s darker than you’ll be used to.”

  Sure enough, what light there was inside the ship was widely spaced and untrustworthy, consisting mainly of smoky oil lamps that swung this way and that with the motion of the ship. We clambered down grimy ladders and through seemingly identical murky corridors for several minutes, moving slowly, with an ear for any legitimate crew who might detain us, but even such slow progress soon brought us to our destination.

  Peters halted before one door much like every other, a painted wooden slab with a brass handle, but no other markings.

  “Your man is inside, Mr Holmes, sir,” Peters whispered. He held his pickaxe handle in one hand and now, with the other, he reached into his jacket and removed a length of metal piping from within. “You best take this, sir,” he said to Holmes, handing it over, then, “Doctor, you have your revolver with you?” he asked. I held the weapon out silently in confirmation.

  “Good. Stay behind me and the lads then, when we get in there.” He turned to the other sailors. “In three, lads,” he said, before holding up three fingers, each of which he lowered in its turn. As the last finger folded in on itself, he nodded and, with a cry of “NOW!” kicked the door with all his strength, sending it flying back on its hinges. We pushed our way into the room behind him, ready for anything, our various weapons held out before us, violence in the very air.

  The room was empty.

  A bunk holding a disordered heap of dirty linen stood directly in front of us, taking up most of the back wall. By its head, a small metal cabinet sat with its door ajar, and at its foot a wastepaper basket. There was no other exit, and though Peters dropped to his knees to look under the bed, no place to hide. It seemed that somehow our man had absconded.

  “I was under the impression that you had checked whether Mr Piennar was within this room?” Holmes asked, making an admirable, if obvious, attempt to keep any note of recrimination from his voice.

  “We did, Mr Holmes,” Peters replied unhappily. “He was here not five minutes since, I promise you.”

  Holmes moved inside the room, wordlessly brushing past the three sailors as he glanced inside the metal cabinet and poked in the wastepaper basket with the metal pole Peters had given him.

  “He has certainly been here recently,” he said after a moment’s thought. “See here: a crushed pack of the brand of cigarette we know he favours and…” he laid a hand on the bed sheet, “…the bed is still warm. There is a little money in the cabinet, so we may assume he will—”

  Whatever he was about to say was lost, however, as a gasp from behind warned me in the nick of time that our quarry had returned. I had a moment in which to duck and attempt to bring my revolver to bear before a blow like an iron bar descended on my arm, striking my wrist and causing me to let go of my grip. The gun spun into the darkness as I found myself face to face with Hans Piennar.

  He was as large as we had been told, six and a half feet tall and almost as broad, with the thickest neck I had ever seen on a man and hands the size of my head. He swung one of those ham-sized fists at me while I was still reeling from the pain in my arm, and though I twisted to avoid it and so was spared a direct hit, his knuckles glanced off my chin with sufficient force to knock me backwards, where my head crashed against the wall. I tried to stand but my legs had lost all utility. I was forced to remain seated, the pain in my head competing with that in my arm and my jaw, and all attempting to send me spinning into unconsciousness at any moment. Piennar stepped past me, and I reached out a hand to stop him, but there was no strength in my arm and he easily brushed me off – though not before I noticed that one shining brass button was missing from the greatcoat he wore, a match I was sure for the one Holmes had found on Mrs van Raalte’s body.

  For the next several minutes I was obliged to take a spectator’s role in proceedings. My compatriots turned as one and engaged the man, but he was too strong and pressed them back, allowing them no time to come at him en masse. One of the sailors went down under the impact of a ferocious double-handed blow, and Piennar quickly stooped and grabbed the fallen man’s weapon, a short, metal-tipped stave, which he swung before him.

  I could see Holmes pushing against the men in front of him, frustration plain on his face.

  “Take him alive, if possible,” he shouted over the others’ cries. “I have questions I should like to ask him.”

  Taking him in any fashion seemed unlikely, however. As Holmes spoke, the second of Peters’s comrades was brought to his knees, then dispatched with a savage uppercut. I felt consciousness threatening to leave me too as I watched the unfortunate man strike the back wall, then fall, eyes open but unseeing, on the bunk. I tasted blood in the back of my throat and felt it running over my eyebrow and down my cheek.

  By the flickering light of the single lamp outside the cabin, I made out Peters pushing forward to thrust a blade deep into Piennar’s shoulder, and I wondered if this marked the turning point in the fight. If it did, though, it was not as I would have hoped, for the huge Boer simply pulled the knife from his flesh and returned it to Peters with the full force of his strength. He buried the blade to the hilt in our friend’s chest, then allowed him to drop to the floor.

  Holmes was alone with Piennar now. He held the metal pole he had been given, extended before him like a rapier, and bounced on the balls of his feet as the Boer kicked Peters’s body out of the way and advanced. Piennar’s own stave hung loosely at his side, as though he had no intention of using it, as though his superiority was so clear he could kill Holmes with his bare hands. I pushed myself up against the wall, ignoring the waves of dizziness and nausea which washed over me, searching for my revolver, but the room spun and I fell back.

  I refocused my eyes just in time to see Holmes lunge forward and Piennar brush off his attack with no more exertion than a man would show when swatting a fly. Holmes’s weapon flew from his hands and clattered away, and Piennar’s massive hands closed round my friend’s throat. I tried again to stand, crying out Holmes’s name as I watched him turning purple then blue in the face, and managed two steps in his direction before my legs gave way once more. I had strength enough left to turn my face, to bear witness to my dearest friend’s final moments, as the life was throttled from him.

  And then, as unconsciousness finally overcame me, I fancied that I heard a loud bang and saw Piennar jerk and loosen his hold on Holmes’s neck. Another loud retort caused my head to ring. Just as my eyes closed I thought I saw him slump to his knees and blood bubble from his mouth.

  I could not be certain, however, and without another thought, darkness claimed me for its own.

  Chapter Eighteen

  When I returned to consciousness, I found myself lying in a hospital bed. My head ached and my arm was securely bandaged, but otherwise I felt myself undamaged though curiously light-headed, even giddy, a sensation I laid at the door of the morphine I could feel dulling the pain. Holmes was seated to my left, hidden behind a newspaper, obliging me to cough loudly in order to gain his attention.

  “Good morning, my dear fellow,” he beamed, folding the newspaper and laying it in his lap. “I had begun to think you intended to sleep the entire day away!”

  His voice was rough and cracked, and as I pushed myself into a seated position I saw a bandage around his throat.

  “We have both been in the wars, it seems,” I said, with some concern, but Holmes would have none of it.

  “In common with your doctors, I have been more concerned with the nasty blow you took to the head than with my own trifling injury,” he said. “Besides, I have only myself to blame, and you to thank. Had you not given the alarm when you did, we might all have been killed.
As it is, one of Peters’s companions broke his neck when thrown against the wall, and Peters himself remains in some pain from a knife wound to his chest. He is expected to live, however, for which he also has you to thank.”

  “And thank you he shall, when he can!”

  Bullock’s voice carried from the doorway of my room, where he stood alongside two uniformed policemen.

  “We’ve just come from his room and taken his statement. Not that it matters specially, not with Rawlins and Piennar both dead.”

  “Piennar is dead, then?” I asked. “I thought that I saw him fall when I heard gunfire, but I could not be sure. Your work, I take it, Inspector?”

  “Not I, Doctor. We have a deal to tell you, it seems, but to start with you should know that the shots that did for Piennar were fired by Henry Craggs!”

  Bullock could not keep a wide grin from his face as he made this revelation. “The clever bugger picked the lock of the room we’d put him in, removed his gun from the drawer of my desk and followed you and Mr Holmes to the docks. By the time we arrived, he’d shot and killed Piennar, and was sitting, quiet as you like, with Mr Holmes. You were still out for the count, of course, and missed all the excitement.”

  “Craggs killed Piennar?” I said, turning to Holmes for confirmation.

  He nodded and whispered, in a voice so quiet that only I could hear him, “And so his revenge was complete,” before raising it to address Bullock. “He did indeed, the poor, unfortunate man. But who can blame him? The fact that he saved the lives of both myself and Dr Watson notwithstanding, he had seen the woman he loved murdered in the most brutal fashion, and had then been forced to flee for his life, suspected of that same hideous crime. What man would not desire vengeance in such a case?”

  “That’s as may be, Mr Holmes, but we can’t encourage people to take the law into their own hands, no matter the provocation.” Clearly, Bullock had some sympathy with Holmes’s words, even if his position made it impossible for him to admit that fact. “You should know that I’ll speak up for Craggs at his trial. He’ll not suffer overmuch for his actions last night.”

  “I am delighted to hear it, Inspector,” said Holmes. “I suspect that Watson and I will have left these shores by the time Craggs is in court, but once I place the documents we discovered in Piennar’s cabin into the hands of the British government, I believe I can safely say that they too will wish to intercede on Mr Craggs’s behalf.”

  “Documents, Holmes?” My head remained heavy, but there was a tale to be told here, one to which I was not as yet privy.

  “In his suitcase, Watson. In code, but of undoubted interest to the British Cabinet. But it would perhaps be simpler if I were to start at the beginning, rather than commencing my explanation at the end?”

  “Certainly, Holmes, do as you think best. Though I warn you that I am still a little woozy, and so may need you to repeat yourself later.”

  In answer, Holmes crossed to the door and firmly closed it. He asked Bullock to move his chair closer to my bed, and did the same with his own. Only once he was completely satisfied that we could not be overheard, did he begin to speak.

  “Almost from our arrival in New York, I have suspected that the whole notion of a duplicate Holmes was but a ruse designed to lure me from England. The work I have been doing for my brother, Mycroft, is important enough that more than one foreign power might think it profitable to do whatever they must to achieve that goal.”

  I had never pried into Holmes’s work for Mycroft, but now that he had broached the subject himself, I felt confident that I should do so. “You believe that the entirety of this affair has had as its sole aim absenting you from London?” In relation to any other man, I would have dismissed such a claim as the wildest and most self-aggrandising fantasy, but I knew Holmes too well even to consider drawing such a conclusion.

  “I do. I had suspected as much even before leaving England, but the instant I saw Rawlins’s mocked-up office, I knew that I was correct. The detective business was an obvious sham, and that being the case, I had to ask myself why.”

  I believed I had spotted a flaw in Holmes’s logic. “But if the goal was simply to divert you, why also bother with blackmail?”

  “I cannot say with certainty, but I imagine initially as a source of income. Our own government has encountered problems in the past in keeping our agents surreptitiously in funds. Why not turn to blackmail to top up their coffers?”

  Bullock had listened to these exchanges with a growing air of confusion. Now, as he considered Holmes’s words, he pounced upon two of them.

  “Our agents, Mr Holmes? What d’you mean by that, if I might ask?”

  Now it was Holmes’s turn to look confused. “Why, surely you have realised by now that Piennar was an agent of a foreign power? More specifically, he worked for the so-called Free States in southern Africa – the Boers.”

  I understood now my friend’s caution in securing my hospital room from intruders. The Boers were a ruthless and violent people, self-proclaimed freedom fighters who, in reality, were revolutionaries determined to destroy anything that did not meet with their satisfaction, regardless of right or law. We had fought one war against them some twenty years before, and it had become plain in recent months that they were itching for another conflict. If Holmes had been investigating them then he had been swimming in deep waters indeed.

  “And Rawlins? Was he also a spy for these Boers?”

  “As I said to Watson a few days ago, Rawlins was obviously glib and convincing, with an easy manner and a gift for ingratiation. In other words, he possessed every talent of the professional confidence man. It occurred to me at the time, however, that an actor would equally well find the description a neat fit. Then, when we discovered Rawlins’s body, I found minute traces of greasepaint under his nails, left there when he removed the make-up that hid his sun-reddened skin and rendered him sufficiently pale to pass for an English detective. He had been punctilious in removing his make-up, even remembering to wipe behind his ears and the nape of his neck, but he had forgotten that fragments would be trapped beneath his nails as he cleaned himself. A burnt hair pin – such as is used to darken the eyebrows and hair for the stage – dropped behind his dressing table heightened my suspicions, but it was only when I checked a variety of actors’ journals at the library that I found mention of N. Rawlins, a jobbing – and not entirely successful – English actor working in the western United States.”

  “You think Piennar hired Rawlins to play you, Mr Holmes? And this in order that you be cajoled from London to New York, the better to allow your enemies to scheme against you?”

  “Against England, rather, but essentially, yes, I believe that to be the case. Mr Rawlins had the added advantage to Piennar, of course, that as a hired hand with no idea of the wider picture, he was utterly expendable. I would suggest that our own investigations indirectly caused his death, in fact. As we closed in, Piennar panicked and was forced to kill Rawlins to ensure his silence, then fled for home.

  “That would also be the reason Piennar left so large a sum of money behind him after murdering Rawlins. He planned to take this ship back to Europe but had no way of knowing how close we were on his heels, or if we suspected him at all. What better way to confuse matters than to leave the money behind? A frightened underling might take only the clothes he required and flee, leaving his superior and their ill-gotten profits behind.”

  “You remain convinced Piennar killed Rawlins, Mr Holmes?” asked Bullock.

  “I do. Just as he killed Mrs van Raalte, once her usefulness was at an end, then attempted to dispose of her body where it might remain hidden until he was safely away. Each was a loose thread that needed to be dealt with before Piennar could leave the country.”

  “You make a convincing case,” Bullock responded thoughtfully. “But there’s one thing that continues to niggle at me. Craggs’s gun. Why leave it by Rawlins’s body, when Piennar must surely have believed him dead?”

 
; “Ah, but remember, Piennar thought the police unaware of Mr Rawlins’s demise. Furthermore, he believed that they still favoured Craggs as the killer of his own fiancée. What better way to muddy the waters than to bring that name into play? If the police were busy hunting a dead man, they could not also be looking for Piennar, leaving him free to flee in safety.”

  Perhaps it was the effects of the medication I had been given, but I was conscious that Holmes had omitted some detail from his retelling. Had I been more myself I would, I think, have said nothing, but the morphine in my system made me loose-tongued.

  “You have not told us what exactly you were being lured from, Holmes,” I said. “On what vital task did Mycroft have you working?”

  Even in my befuddled state, I could tell that Holmes was not pleased by this question. His eyes flicked to Inspector Bullock, then back to me, as he considered how best to answer. Before he could do so, however, Bullock spoke up.

  “I think it might be a good idea if I now absent myself, gentlemen,” he said, fixing his hat firmly on his head. “There’s a great deal still to be done at the station, and if I’m not there… well, it’d be best if I were anyway.”